[maemo-developers] Community council

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Paul Bloch <openartist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Cool, I'm glad this idea has developed.  So what do you think about
> opening up each term as a way for a developer to lead the whole team?

I'd certainly hope that nominees would advocate what they'd bring to
the role in a style similar to that of the Debian Project Leader
elections:

    http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/platforms/he
    http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/platforms/hertzog
    http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/platforms/93sam

...although *much* less wordy and not quite so adversial :-)

> Kind of like our periodic Steve Jobs that helps to steer the project
> for the term and heads development.

An interesting idea, how do you see it working in practice? Flesh it
out a bit on the discussion page and people can get involved in
hammering out the details:

    https://wiki.maemo.org/Talk:Task:Community_Council

> If we get enough in support this
> person could even get some of the donations to the project as a sort
> of head developer.  It would be like an open source vacation. :)

Heh, that'd be very cool. I suspect the practicalities might kill it -
at least in the short term :-)

> I really think we could open up positions in a way that would be
> filled by volunteers, but more similar to how a commercial or
> non-profit project is run.  As I've said, I'm totally interested in
> taking a creative directive role and helping to guide interface
> development, icons, themeing, etc.  I also have ideas for innovating
> in terms of industrial design.

This sounds like a role in developing Maemo itself, and certainly fits
with my own thoughts on increasing the maemo.org community in Maemo
development; but a lot of the ball for that is in Nokia's court[1]. I
would hope this is something the council COULD push for, and that
people who really wanted to see it happen WOULD push for it if they:

    a) stood for election
and b) got elected

Of course, this is all assuming we go ahead with some form of
Community Council, which - as I said - I think will require some clear
indication of consensus in the community for it to be taken seriously.

Cheers,

Andrew

[1] https://wiki.maemo.org/Increasing_transparency

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/